Page 191 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1492 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

to feed, clothe, and house increasing numbers of their ing young children is not such a problem. Furthermore
own species. agriculture makes it possible to increase the amount of
food produced within a given area, so it is possible to
Paleolithic Migration accommodate population increase even without migrat-
and Early Agriculture ing to new lands. Perhaps even more important, for farm-
Population increase is apparent even in the Paleolithic ing households in most pre-modern agricultural commu-
era, though in this era it mainly took the form of a slow nities it was important to have lots of children because
but accelerating capacity to migrate into new environ- this increased the available labor. In a world of high
ments. Humans probably evolved in the savanna lands death rates (commonly in pre-modern agricultural soci-
of southern and eastern Africa, and for all but the last ten eties, up to 20 percent of infants died in their first year,
thousand years, we have lived as foragers. But the variety and another 30 percent before their fifth birthday), the
of foraging techniques used by humans clearly increased best way of maximizing the number of children surviving
over time. Archaeological evidence suggests that even to adulthood was to have as many children as possible.
100,000 years ago, humans were exploring new environ- Such behavior, and the increased resources available
ments—in arid regions, for example, or near seashores within agrarian societies, ensured that populations
or in tropical forests (McBrearty and Brooks 2000, 493– would grow much faster than in the Paleolithic era.
494, 530). Then, from about 100,000 years ago, As in the Paleolithic era, population growth led to
humans began to migrate out of Africa.They appeared in migrations, and as farmers migrated they helped spread
the very different environments of Australia (from per- agriculture around the world. But migration was not the
haps fifty thousand years ago), ice age Siberia (perhaps only option, for farmers, unlike foragers, could also cre-
thirty thousand years ago), and finally the Americas ate larger and more densely settled communities. Even-
(from at least thirteen thousand years ago). Though we tually, “intensification” of this kind led to the emergence
have no direct evidence, we can be sure that these migra- of communities large enough and complicated enough
tions meant an increase in the total number of humans. to be called cities. Seeing these long-term trends was not
This remains true even though each particular commu- always easy at the time, because local population gains
nity remained small, so that contemporaries could hardly could easily be wiped out by famines or epidemics. So,
be aware that human numbers were increasing. to contemporaries, cycles of growth and decline were
From about ten thousand years ago, as the last ice age more apparent than the long-term trend toward growth.
was ending, agricultural communities appeared in dif- Indeed, these cycles provide the central idea of Thomas
ferent parts of the world. Agriculture quickened popula- Malthus (1766–1834), the founder of modern demo-
tion growth. Current estimates suggest that there may graphic studies: that population growth would always
have been 5 to 10 million humans ten thousand years end up exceeding productive capacity so that periodic
ago; 50 million five thousand years ago; and 250 million population crashes were inevitable.
just one thousand years ago.Agriculture stimulated pop-
ulation growth in many ways. Nomadic foragers have a Industrial and Scientific
limited ability to increase production from a given area, Innovation
so they have powerful reasons to limit the number of In the last thousand years, population growth has accel-
children too young to walk or forage on their own, and erated once again as the global human population has
to limit the numbers trying to feed from a given area. risen from 250 million one thousand years ago, to 950
Modern anthropological studies suggest that foragers million two hundred years ago, and more than 6 billion
have many ways of limiting population growth, includ- today. There are many specific causes for population
ing prolonged breast feeding and even infanticide. How- increase in given instances, but once again, the most gen-
ever, agriculturalists are normally sedentary, so transport- eral explanation for this increase is that increasing rates